Top 3 worst ideas in Amiga history?

[Boot_WB]

Originally Posted by tone007  View Post
No.

Yes.

Maybe?

[bloodline]

Speaking of display stuff, considering you could support 6-bitplanes on ECS, I think EHB was a pretty stupid idea. Why not just have 64 distinct palette entries instead?

Space on the IC, commodore were using a chip technology that was old by the time ECS was used, Denise would have had to have 32 more palette entry registers (each one 12bits wide? IIRC)! That uses up a lot of silicon, much cheaper in silicon to use a trick like EHB.

[darkcoder]

The worst idea was definately AGA.  More resources should have been put into making AAA available when AGA came out.  The A3000+ should have been the A4000.  A4000 was filled with poor choices and feels like it was rushed out.  For one, the loss of the flicker-fixer were just idoitic.  When I upgraded from my A3000 to an A4000, I was so upset that my newer computer couldn't use the nice monitor I was using on my A3000 and I had to spend all this extra money on an expensive 1942 monitor.

The decision to put a HD floppy in the A4000 was good the fact the drive was 1.5 height left you with a completely useless 0.5 height drive bay.  But to make matters worse, since the A1200 didn't come with an HD drive, no commercial developers used HD floppys.  This left the HD drive in A4000s useless except for personal purposes and game were coming on 14+ DD floppies instead of a more reasonable 7.

Also the A1200 should have come with an 68030 as standard (or a 44 or 50Mhz 020).  25Mhz 020's were too slow in comparison to standard PC's and Macs of that time.

But really, I think the biggest problem was that ECS was just too good and AGA was not enough of an improvement.  Developers mostly just targetted ECS machines as that market was bigger and as a result there was not enough incentive for many people to upgrade to an AGA machine.  ECS thrived for much longer than it should have and AGA machines never sold as well as they needed too.

@MPiva

 when you say ECS you really mean the Original Chip Set, don't you?
I think that the most disappoining chipset was the ECS (the A3000/A600 chipset, relesed in 1990) not AGA.
ECS came out in 1990, 5 years later than OCS. The only improvements were genlock capabilities and the Shres and 31Khz modes. Since the latter were limited to 4 colors chosen from a 64 palette, they were not useful for games, and very limited for professional application. Also note that such modes on ECS (unlike AGA) use a palette encoding different from the standard Amiga palette making more difficult to have draggable screens with SHRES and other res. at the same time.
So in 5 years C= gave us only minor improvements, not suitable for the most successful Amiga applications, i.e., games.
AGA came out in 1992. I agree that is was not enough to keep up with other platforms, but with respect to ECS was a BIG improvement, released only 2 years later.
If ECS would have been released in 1988 and AGA in 1990, then AGA would have been a very good evolutionary step!


ok, my own 3 worst ideas/product
1. Not choosing a strategy, a market target. They want to market Amiga for professionals as well as for games. They also wanted to explore new markets (CDTV) too far ahead of itheir time

2. Not enough R&D, splitted between software or for hardware. Amiga started with the most advanced hardware and a very promising but still immature OS. Then C= developed a lot the OS (2.0 was a big improvement) and not enough the hardware (ECS and A600). Then tried again to do both. Probably it would have been better to concentrate either on
the OS (like Apple) or on the hardware (like console makers). best of all, of course, would have been to spend a lot more of their cospicuous profits in R&D :-D

3 ECS and (closely related) the A600

[NovaCoder]

In no order:

1) A600
2) CDTV
3) AGA based A4000

Unlike most people, I think that the CD32 was actually a good product.

[amigadave]

This is a really pointless thread, as everyone has their own separate ideas about what should and should not have been done by Commodore, but I might as well throw my own 2 cents in the pot.

1. Worst idea was selling the Amiga to any company in the first place and losing control of the company's future.  I know that this is all unrealistic, but I wish Jay Miner and the group of great hardware and software people he had gathered together to create the Amiga could have somehow kept a controlling interest in the Amiga and just sold enough minor silent partnerships to make it into production.  I believe that Jay and company would have done a much better job of staying ahead of the competition and doubt that they could have done any worse at marketing the Amiga than Commodore did.

I think Jay & company might have given us ECS and AmigaOS2.0 within 18 to 24 months after the initial release of the A1000.  Although all Amigas would have retained the ability to display 15khz modes for compatibility with TV monitors, all models after the A1000 would have included flicker fixers and starting with the A3000, the OS would have the option of running in RTG mode.  Video card drivers would be developed by every video card maker because by the time the A3000 was released the Amiga would have been so popular that it would have been competing head to head with the Intel PC compatible computers and Apple Macs because of number 2 below.

2.  Second worse mistake that Commodore made with the Amiga was to allow the misconception that the Amiga was only a games machine to persist.  Commodore should have either subsidized the creation of business applications, or developed them "In House".  Money spent in this way would have made much more sense than wasting money on creating the A2000 with ISA slots and developing crappy bridge boards to allow Amigas to run MS-DOS, or Windows3.1 apps.  Having better apps written natively for the AmigaOS which could run circles around any Intel PC clones that were available when the A1000 was first released would have made a much better impression and shown how superior the Amiga was in comparison to the PC or Mac.  With the Amiga's hardware advantage at the time of it's first release, it should have blown away all of it's competition in every part of the software spectrum, including business software for the PC and music and desk top publishing on the Mac.  By default of it's superior hardware capabilities, game designers/programmers chose to write games for the Amiga with no incentives from Commodore, but business application programmers of that time did not see the need for any of the Amiga's sound or color advantages and since Commodore had made no, or little effort to market the Amiga to businesses and corporations, there was not sufficient incentive for business app programmers to write their apps, or port their apps to the Amiga.

3.  With the Amiga's huge advantages in creativity potential, Commodore should have pushed them into every school on the planet, just like Apple did, or attempted to do when they were getting started.  Had Commodore beat Apple into the schools, it would have made a huge difference in what parents and kids themselves would have purchased while they were in school and after they got out of school.  It also would have fueled the creative minds of millions of kids to create wonderful programs and computer generated music and art on those Amigas for everyone to see and listen to which would have been better advertising than anything Commodore ever did on TV or on the radio.

Hind sight always seems better and easier, but nobody really knows how things might have turned  out if this or that had been done differently in the past.

As for those that list one Amiga model or another as one of the three worst Amiga ideas in history, I would have to disagree.  Their timing may have been bad, or way too little way too late, but I can enjoy any of the Amiga models and would not call any of them completely useless, or crap.  I rather like the CDTV's looks and it could have been a great idea if it had been marketed correctly at the right time.  Of course coming after the A1000 it should have had more advanced capabilities too, not just the addition of a CD drive.  The A600 is a nice little machine, if it could have been produced and sold for a very low price just for gaming, but it's lack of expandability and late release with virtually the same capabilities of the A1000 and A500 did not make sense.

[rav098]

1. Butchering the A1200 to reduce cost
2. CDTV
3. Not marketing the CD32

agreed with u Fanscale

[marcfrick2112]

Probly get flamed for this... But I actually find some use for the extra-halfbrite mode.... later versions of DPaint have an 'EHB' mode, maybe useless to many, but makes it fairly easy to add shadows to moving objects... since each color has a version that is half the brightness... Brilliant! (OK, not really, but I thought it was kinda cool...)

:hammer:

[Karlos]

Probly get flamed for this... But I actually find some use for the extra-halfbrite mode.... later versions of DPaint have an 'EHB' mode, maybe useless to many, but makes it fairly easy to add shadows to moving objects... since each color has a version that is half the brightness... Brilliant! (OK, not really, but I thought it was kinda cool...)

:hammer:

That, in my book, makes a perfectly legitimate use for the EHB. I would have preferred a direct 64-colour display but what can you do? Didn't a few games also use EHB?

[Amiga_Nut]

1. Butchering the A1200 to reduce cost
2. CDTV
3. Not marketing the CD32

CD32 is an interesting one, had Commodore known the first thing about console design and production they would have re-jigged the onboard memory to 1.5mb Chip .5mb Fast to produce a machine twice as fast.

Every console you care to mention has weird memory setups to maximise their speed, C= threw away 50% of the potential speed for the sake of either a SIMM socket (the N64 had a memory upgrade slot for the graphics, and the Saturn used RAM carts etc so this is not unusual) or solder in 256k or 512k of Fast ram as required.

The rest of it is kind of historic, by the time the A1000 was in shops in the EU IBM ALREADY had VGA finished, so technically when the A500 and A2000 machines were released with zero improvements (no parallax scrolling worth a damn, pathetic weak hardware sprites like the Atari 8 bits, insufficient sound channels) we all knew where this was heading. The A3000 and A600 with the same unimproved chipset abilities and the AGA with the same 8 bit sound with 4 channels and 8 bitplane(!!!) 256 colour mode were the final nail in the coffin to a company which lost its way since Jack was kicked out (in favour of that brown midget donk and the old codger funding things....yeah that was a good move).

[Karlos]

I'll go a step further than that and say releasing any machine with a 020+ without fast ram fitted was a mistake.

[nikodr]

I believe the lack of chunky screen resolutions killed amiga.By 1993 many software houses were releasing games for 256 colors,if you look at some of those adventures such as bloodnet,i believe that with clever design software houses could get away with the planar limitation (as in the case of bloodnet).

However most software houses did not have a dedicated hard core programmers to port stuff to amiga and optimize things for the amiga system.They just used the same engine with 32 color reduction (like most sierra games adventures) which are awfull (i mean the sierra ones) with the exception of king's quest 6 that programmers did a very good job at color reduction.

Lack of chunky modes prohibited companies from porting direct the so many 256 color games.So that eventually left amiga with no support from sierra,lucas arts,origin and many other big companies that moved on to pc.I think with 2-4 mbytes of fast ram and chunky format in 1992-1994 amiga could have survived.

Second worst idea was the fact that amiga did not come shipped even with a 40mbyte hard disk.That killed platform as a game machine for big games.And companies weren't anymore interested to port games like Monkey island 2,or Fate of atlantis.

So for me no 1 mistake is lack of chunky pixels,and no 2 lack of hard disk.
How much more expensive could a 1200 be if it had chunky support (even with something like akiko) and 2 mbytes of fast ram and a hard disk of 60-80 mbytes?

[AmigaNG]

1. Releasing the A500 Plus but not telling anyone, and having backward compatibility issues with it.

2. A600 i think was a good idea, have it cost more than a A500 Plus was not

3. A1200 & A4000 should have been developed a little bit further, and had more features to say competitive.

4. THE BIGGEST OF THEM ALL:- Not using the Boing Ball as the official logo instead that stupid colour tick!

[Pentad]

Just my $.02 worth:

1.  Transformer/Sidecar:  Commodore made big promises to an already doubtful press and industry about IBM compatibility and the Amiga.  With Commodore's history of vaporware and products that didn't quite measure up, these two items -I feel- severely damaged their Amiga creditability.

Transformer was a great idea on paper but a horrible failure for real world use.   Having a chart to calculate how many *TIMES* slower your application would run on Transformer  (if it ran at all) in the manual combined with Transformer's cost was just a disaster...no, I'm sorry, it was embarrassing.

Sidecar wasn't a bad product or idea if it hadn't been born out of the abortion that Transformer turned out to be.  "Significantly less than $1000.00", as quoted by Commodore but the final price?  $999.99.  Wow, my cup runneth over!

In the end, this damaged Commodore's lackluster reputation even more...



2.  Herding Commodore 64 users to the promised land:   It amazes me that Commodore had this built-in crowd of Commodore 64 (and 128) users that numbered in the *tens* of millions but did hardly anything to migrate this base to their next machine.

Even Apple went out of their way to migrate Apple II users to Macs with Apple II cards, disk drive plug-ins, emulators, and converter software.

By not doing anything to salvage their investment in Commodore, it gave them no reason not to look else where and else where they did...


3.   Marketing:   I know you've all heard this before but look at bad the 128k-single drive- Macintosh really was but they marketed it like it was the second coming.  Commodore's marketing was terrible for a new product launch.

Even the Atari ST's marketing was outstanding compared to Commodore's.  

Apple:  "The computer for the rest of us."
Atari:  "Power without the price."
Commodore: Ah, did they have a slogan?

4.  Icons/Graphics:   Apple (Steve Jobs) understood that you have to have icons, windows, and graphics that look nice.  You may argue for or against how cute they look but people *DO* judge a book by its cover especially when they don't understand how a computer works.

Workbench 1.0 through Workbench 1.3.0 looked like a brain damaged third grader designed the icons.   With no set standard you had companies creating icons from hell that took up half the screen while others created icons smaller than the mouse pointer.  Who thought creating icons that were wider than they were taller looked good?  Stevie Wonder?  Ack!

Apple lucked into Susan Kare but Commodore should have grabbed Jim Sachs from the beginning and hired him to do icons/windows/boot screens/manuals.

Just MHO,
-P

[Speelgoedmannetje]

All with all, the whole Amiga is just rubbish! Let's all ditch it!

[LoadWB]

Taking all of the things in this thread, but particularly inspired by amigadave's musings, I momentarily shifted into a universe where the biggest news of the decade was Amiga's abandoning of PPC for AMD64.  Back in the 90s.

(Wait, wha... seriously?  Yeah, as a corollary to the Amiga philosophy, 64-bit processing was a great idea and we should have been on it in the 90s -- and Intel just could not do it.  But instead we hamstrung ourselves for almost 20 years on an architecture needing life-support and regular face-lifts and tummy-tucks, and really damn good PR.  Could you imagine what x86 would look like if it were a person?)

[m4rk1z]

Well, i was in there from the beginning so believe me on this:

1. The price, too high for all models (the first a2000/a3000
   and later a4000 i saw was in a tv broatcast studio)!
2. The a500 was great for gaming but BIG mistake making all the
   games with ONE firebutton like the C=64 had (later/too late
   corrected with cd32)
3. Sound chip should be 16bit in first place.

The only stuff that keeped me long time (until 1993/95) into the
amiga was the demo scene and games until they lost support from
companys b/c of high piracy just like the c=64...

cya